tickets
/ cast and crew / photographs
/ local restaurants
Erika Milvy
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
The
East Bay Express
"Hey pal. C'mere and kill a president,"
calls a carnival barker at the Ashby Stage, who invites folks
to plunk down a coin, pull the trigger, aim for the target, and
win a prize. In Assassins, Stephen Sondheim's musical
comedy salute to presidential assassins, the top-shelf prize is
eternal infamy.
The Shotgun Players have staged a superb rendition
of Assassins, Sondheim's delectably offbeat 1990 musical.
Staged as a grotesque carnival, the production trots out a murderous
lineup of sad sacks and misguided misfits who fired on Presidents
Lincoln through Reagan. The play asks the question: "Why'da
do it?"
The answers range from traitorous to Jodie Foster.
The shooters are bizarre buffoons and poor slobs — some
angry, most of them crazy. Tapping into the aesthetics of Edward
Gorey, Bertolt Brecht, and Tim Burton, Susannah Martin's inventive
production mixes sideshow freakishness, societal disenfranchisement,
and human desperation into one big ball of delicious, sickly-sweet
cotton candy. Sondheim's play also invokes Kander and Ebb's musical
Chicago, which used showmanship and razzle-dazzle to
comment on the cult of celebrity.
A banjo-strumming balladeer, embodied impeccably
by Kevin Singer, sings of the nine men and women who got it in
their head to assassinate the president. An old-timey folk singer
and a one-man Greek chorus, he sings of these anti-heroes in the
genres of country bluegrass, delta blues, and big-band jazz.
"The Ballad of Booth," a jangly country
tune about the nation's first presidential assassin, is both flip
and sincere. The song's rhymes and rhythms mock the gravity of
the crime and offset the lyrics' otherwise overbearing peachiness:
Angry men don't write the rules and guns don't right the wrongs,
sings the balladeer. Galen Murphy-Hoffman plays the dashing impassioned
John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin, who scribbles his pro-confederate
motives in his diary. Damn, you Johnny/You paved the way, the
balladeer sings. One of the legacies of Lincoln's assassination
was that such an idea was now in place.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey
Oswald (also played by Singer) is the disarmingly unadorned center
of the Assassins vaudeville. We've seen the clownish
Charles Guiteau, played by Steven Hess, assassinate President
Garfield because he wanted to be ambassador to France. We see
Sara Jane Moore (Rebecca Castelli) shooting at her Kentucky Fried
Chicken bucket as she gears up to shoot Ford. We watch Sam Byck
(Ryan Drummond) making a tape for Leonard Bernstein and plotting
to bomb Nixon's White House. But it is Oswald's inner turmoil
that smartly relieves the flippancy of the play and gives Assassins
a greater dimension. The play shifts tone to psychological realism
as Booth eloquently gives voice to Oswald's hopelessness. Invoking
Willy Loman, Arthur Miller's downtrodden Everyman, Booth explains
that "attention must be paid." Certainly, all these
assassins crave attention. By reframing Oswald as a Loman figure,
Kennedy's killer takes on a tragic dimension, and the play takes
itself seriously for a much-needed minute. But just for a minute.
As the ghoulish proprietor, Jeff Garrett coaxes
his patrons to blow off some steam by shooting a president. A
barbershop quartet of assassins harmonically inveigles the disgruntled:
All you have to do/Is move you little finger, crook your little
finger and you can change the world. In "The Ballad of Guiteau,"
James Garfield's killer marches triumphantly to the hanging noose,
singing, I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad. Hess is wonderfully
bizarre as Guiteau. His Pentecostal hymn bears resemblance to
Eric Idle's cockeyed crucifix ditty "Always Look on the Bright
Side of Life."
In one of the funniest numbers, John Hinkley (Danny
Cozart) and Squeaky Fromme (Cody Metzger) bond over their undying
obsessive devotion to Jodie Foster and Charles Manson, respectively.
Cozart plays Hinkley as a love-sick sap, hoping to impress the
actress by shooting Ronald Reagan. Metzger plays the hippy waif
and Manson girl Fromme, who shoots Ford so Manson can get back
into the spotlight.
As Sam Byck, Drummond is a more comical Loman figure.
Wearing a Santa suit and prone to sing from West Side Story, he
plots an elaborate assassination of Richard Nixon. Castelli is
dazzling as Moore, the eccentric housewife who shoots Colonel
Sanders much better than she shoots Gerald Ford. She's the singer
with serious chops in this show.
Under David Möschler's deft musical direction,
the musical numbers, with an onstage band of trombone, trumpet,
bass, and mandolin, are inventive and wonderful. Erika Chong Shuch's
choreography and Christine Crook's costumes add to the tantalizing
spectacle.
